In this interview for STATUS/الوضع, host Mohamad Ali Nayel speaks with Afrah Nasser about the forgotten war in Yemen. Nasser reflects on the humanitarian crisis created by the war in Yemen and the situation of Yemeni women six years after thousands of women marched the streets of Sanaa commemorating International Women’s Day.
Afrah Nasser worked as a reporter at the Yemen Observer newspaper in Yemen (2008-2011) and started blogging since Yemen’s 2011 uprising, focusing on politics and human rights issues. Her blog was featured as one of the ten must-read blogs from the Middle East by CNN and one of the top Middle East blogs by Al-Monitor. Her writings were ...

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on the Arabian Peninsula and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Arabian Peninsula Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to ap@jadaliyya.com by Monday night of every week.]
Regional and International Relations
Saudi foreign assets keep falling in April amid heavy overseas borrowing “The Saudi Arabian central bank's foreign assets fell in April as the government borrowed heavily abroad.”
Shaken Opec seeks to work alongside shale oil producers “Opec was once a by-word for ...

[The following report was originally published on 13 April 2017 by the International Crisis Group. The full report can be found here.]
War in denying Yemenis food to eat. This special briefing, the first of four examining the famine threats there and in South Sudan, Nigeria and Somalia, urges the Saudi-led coalition not to assault Yemen's most important port, Hodeida, and both sides to immediately resolve deadlock over the Central Bank.
I. Overview
Yemenis are starving because of war. No natural disaster is responsible. No amount of humanitarian aid can solve the underlying problem. Without an immediate, significant course change, portions of the country, in the ...

“I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes. It would spread a lively terror.”
-- Winston Churchill, 1920, with regard to the uprising in Iraq.
London
On 23 March 2017, Khalid Masood ploughed his car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge in London, stabbed a police officer with a knife, and then was shot dead. He killed four people in the rampage, which injured an additional forty people and disturbed the equanimity of a major Western city. Masood, who was born in Dartford (Kent, United Kingdom), had run afoul of the law for many years—mainly because of acts of violence ...

This week’s Jadaliyya “Media on Media” Roundup examines several important topics affecting the MENA region’s mediascape. The Pentagon released an aerial photo of a building demolished by a U.S. airstrike in Syria alleged to be an al-Qaeda center. However, local activists insist it was a mosque and the airstrike killed innocent civilians. Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) executive committee member Dr. Hanan Ashrawi denounced the U.N’s decision to remove a report calling Israel an apartheid state from its website. A German newspaper was forced to remove Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s name from a list of “crazy leaders”, following accusations of ...

This week’s Jadaliyya “Media on Media” roundup looks at several important dyanmics shaping the MENA region’s mediascape. In Palestine, Arabs took to the streets to protest Israeli legislation that aims to silence mosque loudspeakers. Several Syrian activists protested Jaysh al-Islam representing opposition groups and leading Geneva peace talks, given their increased clampdown on free speech in Ghouta. A Syrian teenager who was the victim of online bullying on Facebook sued the company. Accusing it of failing the to delete the defamatory posts, he nevertheless lost the case against the corporate giant. The Intercept carried out an investigation on a U.S. raid in the ...

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on the Arabian Peninsula and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Arabian Peninsula Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to ap@jadaliyya.com by Monday night of every week.]
Regional and International Relations
Somalia ‘plans to file legal complaint against UAE’ over Somaliland base “Farah said Emirati officials had bribed officials in Somaliland to get the deal through.”
Iran discovers major shale oil reserves in western province “The reserves are estimated to hold as much as ...

Wednesday, February 1 (New York, New York)
On Thursday, February 2, Yemeni grocery store owners across five New York boroughs will close 1,000 stores from 12pm to 8pm in response to the Trump administration’s infamous “Muslim Ban” executive order. This shutdown of grocery stores and bodegas will be a public show of the vital role these grocers and their families play in New York’s economic and social fabric and, during this period, grocery store owners will spend time with their families and loved ones to support each other; many of these families have been directly affected by the Ban.
Thursday evening at 5:15pm, at Brooklyn Borough Hall, 209 Joralemon St. in ...

In this interview, Sheila Carapico discusses the yearlong Saudi Arabia-led and US-backed military attacks on Yemen. The interview was conducted by Shahram Aghamir on August 31, 2016.
Sheila Carapico is Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Richmond. Carapico is the author of Civil Society in Yemen: The Political Economy of Activism in Modern Arabia (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and numerous articles and book chapters on Yemen, the Arabian Peninsula, and the region. A contributing editor to Middle East Report, she has also written essays for several publications about the Egyptian ...

[The Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen was conceived as a short, sharp campaign that would quickly achieve the objective of restoring the government of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi to power. Yet it is today no closer to realizing its aims than when it began in March 2015. In the meantime much of Yemen and its infrastructure has been reduced to rubble while, the country is experiencing a severe humanitarian crisis, al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the Islamic State (IS) movement are exploiting the resultant political vacuum to expand their base and conduct increasingly brazen attacks, and the continued existence of Yemen itself is increasingly in doubt. To ...

This week, Jadaliyya's "Media on Media" roundup takes a closer look at the media industry in the Middle East. In the shadow of Syria’s inconsistent media coverage, an entrepreneurial journalist has developed a platform which uses geo-tracking to collect social media from and on conflict zones. The platform can directly benefit investigative journalists in areas where conflict-zones are too dangerous to monitor physically.
Zawya has released an updated report on Arab reality television released in 2015-2016, an indicator of the popularity of reality TV shows in the Arab world. At the same time, the demand for more Islamic-themed media content has led to ...

Sheila Carapico, editor, Arabia Incognita: Dispatches from Yemen and the Gulf. Charlottesville: Just World Books, 2015.
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Sheila Carapico (SC): This book began as an activist political project, a form of protest against a cruel war. Colleagues at MERIP were thinking of compiling a simple PDF reader to help students and others understand the background to the military intervention in Yemen the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia called Operation Decisive Storm ...

[This is an ongoing post that will be updated regularly. It was first published on 6 December 2016. The updates appear at the bottom.]
The conflict in Yemen seems set to intensify as 2016 draws to a close. The deposed president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi returned to Aden from exile in mid-November after his government was reestablished in the southern city. This move, alongside a renewed ground campaign and the continued aerial bombardment throughout northern Yemen by the Saudi Arabia-led ...

[The following report summary was published by the International Organization for Migration on 14 May 2017. For the full report, click here.]
The Task Force for Population Movement (TFPM), co-led by IOM and UNHCR is a Technical Working Group of the Yemen Protection Cluster. The TFPM implements an information management tool that gathers data on the status and location of displaced persons across Yemen.
As of 01 April 2017, the TFPM has identified, 1,988,946 internally displaced persons (IDPs) ...

[The following report summary was published by the International Organization on Migration’s Displacement Tracking Matrix on 15 March 2017. For the full report, click here.]
Task Force on Population Movement | TFPM Yemen | 13th Report – March 2017
The Task Force for Population Movement (TFPM), co-led by IOM and UNHCR is a Technical Working Group of the Yemen Protection Cluster. The TFPM implements an information management tool that gathers data on the status and location of ...

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on the Arabian Peninsula and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Arabian Peninsula Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to ap@jadaliyya.com by Monday night of every week.]
Regional and International Relations
Saudi deputy crown prince, Trump meeting a 'turning point': Saudi adviser A main topic of the meeting ...

[The following report was issued by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on 15 March 2017.]
Number of people at emergency food insecurity levels increases 20 per cent in nine months
15 March 2017, Sana'a/Amman - Severe food insecurity threatens more than 17 million people in conflict-ridden Yemen, according to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis released by the United Nations and humanitarian partners today.
Twenty of the ...

This week’s Jadaliyya "Media on Media" roundup delves into several topics affecting the Middle East and North Africa region. Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ continues to make headlines, prompting a series of interesting debates and discussions. Security researcher Ryan Lackey advises visa-holders affected by Trump’s "Muslim ban" on how to enter the U.S. with their digital privacy intact.
The Washington Post discusses a German news story accusing a refugee "sex mob" of harassing ...

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on the Arabian Peninsula and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Arabian Peninsula Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to ap@jadaliyya.com by Monday night of every week.]
Regional and International Relations
Saudi inflation plunge aids government in fight to tame deficit “While inflation could fall a ...

Contemporary protracted conflicts across the Middle East have presented health systems and professionals with unprecedented challenges. The objective of this manifesto on conflict medicine is to highlight the need for a better understanding of the different pathways of injury and re-injury within the changing ecology of war.
Ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen are taking place in urban settings and result in high casualties among civilians and combatants alike. In fact, the distinction ...

The body of water now known as the Red Sea was surrounded for nearly four centuries by the Ottoman Empire's well-protected domains. During that time, it became a space of not only geological and geographic but also historical coherence. While the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and other maritime spaces have inspired their own fields of history writing, especially after the recent "oceanic turn," historians have been curiously silent about the Red Sea. In his new monograph, The ...